Around here, Samuel Slater is seen as the visionary who launched the American Industrial Revolution. But across the pond, as we say now, in the Town of Belper, England, where Slater was born, he once...

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By
Michael P. McKinney
Posted Jan. 12, 2014 @ 12:01 am

Around here, Samuel Slater is seen as the visionary who launched the American Industrial Revolution.

But across the pond, as we say now, in the Town of Belper, England, where Slater was born, he once had a different distinction:

“Slater the Traitor.”

And come June, Pawtucket will commemorate its 20th anniversary as a sister city to Belper.

Before the mills sprang up on the banks of the Blackstone River, before the textile industry got cranking in New England, Slater was an apprentice in Belper, where he learned his skills before coming to the New World.

English law in those days held that a person with that kind of knowledge could not take it to another place — think of it as trade secrets of the time.

“He absconded with the plans,” said Natalie Carter, of the Blackstone Valley Tourism Bureau.

“He came over with that either written down in his sock or he memorized the plans,” said Carter, who has traveled some 35 times to Belper and its environs, the Derwent Valley.

(Sometimes history depends on who is writing it down, and when and where it’s recorded. On a recent trip to Spain, for instance, the figure I’d come to know in school as Sir Francis Drake, one of the commanders of the British ships that jousted with the Spanish Armada, came by another title: the pirate Drake.)

But time appears to heal old wounds in Slater’s case, because today there is a blue plaque commemorating Slater in his birthplace, a high honor in England. So much for being a traitor.

Carter said a website this year will celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Pawtucket-Belper sister-community status, an agreement notched on June 11, 1994.

Adrian Farmer, heritage coordinator for Derwent Valley Mills World Heritage Site, has written a book about his town, “Belper Through Time.”

The book’s introduction says Belper “has survived the ensuing contraction of the UK textile industry and is now flowering again, aided by global recognition of this area’s historic significance through UNESCO’s decision to inscribe it on the World Heritage List in 2001.”

Sound a little familiar? Rebirth is a frequent theme in stories about Pawtucket — former mill city, once home to thriving mills, etc. There’s a movement to designate the Blackstone Valley Corridor a national historic park. Like its sister in England, Pawtucket seeks to reinvent itself, most notably as an arts destination with its Gamm Theatre and its Armory.

So whatever controversy Samuel Slater sparked when he brought his industrial secrets to Rhode Island, the two communities of Belper and Pawtucket today celebrate a historical symmetry, their mills standing as monuments to the birth of the Industrial Age.